1989: The CCP’s Near Escape } 483
to economic stagnation and shortages in the supply of goods available to
China’s people. It was the increasing abundance of such goods due to China’s
post-1978 opening and reform that had allowed the CCP to survive the 1989
challenge while communist parties in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
failed. If the CCP now retreated from opening and reform, Deng insisted,
that was the road to regime collapse. From June 1989 to early 1992, conserva-
tive voices within the elite prevailed. Eventually, in 1992, Deng would wage
what scholar Ezra Vogel called his “last battle,” mobilizing pro-opening and
reform forces to launch China boldly in that direction.
The underlying difference between Deng Xiaoping and his conservative
opponents had to do with how best to ensure the survival of the CCP regime.
Deng argued that delivering continued rapid increases in living standards
was the only way the CCP regime could survive. Opening to the West and
reform via markets were the key to rapid improvement in living standards,
he believed. Socialist CCP-ruled China, therefore, had to continue to draw
on the capital, technology, know-how, and export markets of the advanced
capitalist countries, the West. If China once again closed itself off from the
outside world, the result would be, as in Europe, collapse and extinction for
the Chinese Communist Party regime.^33
One of the sharpest and most humorous statements of the pro-opening
point of view came in a defense of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone by
Vice Premier Tian Jiyun in April 1992. From the standpoint of CCP rightists,
the SEZs were conduits for Western subversion and infiltration which should
be closed down or at least tightly regulated. This led Tian to propose that
special zones be organized along lines of China’s pre-1978 policies and that
traditional Marxists be invited to live in those zones. Tian suggested:
Let us carve out a piece of land where policies favored by the leftists [i.e.,
conservatives] will be practiced. For example, no foreign investment
will be allowed here, and all foreigners will be kept out. Inhabitants of
the zone can neither go abroad or send their children overseas. There
will be total state planning. Essential supplies will be rationed and citi-
zens of the zones will have to queue up for food and other consumer
products.^34
Comments by Deng Xiaoping in the immediate aftermath of the Beijing
Massacre gave credence to the hard-line view of a linkup between domestic
and foreign counterrevolutionary forces. In a speech on June 9, 1989, Deng
referred to the June “storm” as a product of an international macro-climate
and a domestic micro-climate. A week later, he elaborated: “The entire impe-
rialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the social-
ist road and then bring them under the control of international monopoly
capital and onto the capitalist road.”^35 Rightist leaders seized on Deng’s com-
ments to push for a campaign against what they deemed the Western strategy